These statistics (see below) are more or less what you’d expect: https://gss.bsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018_BSA_GSS_Report_en.pdf
Unfortunately, Russia is pretty strict on enforcing copyright amongst government and commercial organizations these days. In light of recent events, it really needs to stop that.
I also find it ironic that amongst ordinary people, it is Russian liberals/SWPLs (lowest life form on the planet) who have the most respect for copyright, because that it is the Western and “civilized” thing to do. Cargo cultism in action. The irony is that all the really cool kids in the West couldn’t care less for that. They are shocked and bewildered to hear it.
PS. My piracy guide is here: https://akarlin.com/piracy-guide-2018/
PPS. Powerful money saving tip from Thorfinnsson: https://akarlin.com/piracy-guide-2018/#comment-2311421
It used to be that there were two grades of piracy in Russia. Firstly, out and out copies made in the crudest way. When these firms failed to pay up protection money, there would be a picture of police vehicles crushing large numbers of CD’s. Then there were guaranteed functional releases usually about three months after an official upgrade by the foreign software house. One could almost swear that these were “licenced” pirates. Somehow they managed to release good quality software, complete with individual serial numbers, at a price intermediate between the vendor price and the rip off copies. Surely this was not a case of cooperation with copyright holders who wanted to block rival products acquiring long term market share? When governments like Munich, India, Russia and even China threatened to move from Windows to Linux, Microsoft flooded the elite schools and universities with free windows computers and office suites and perhaps even licenced some pirates. Even Munich has given up now (just as Google Chrome acquires steroids).
That is not a virgin, that dude is obviously five months pregnant…perhaps the Chads were responsible when heavily inebriated.
Peace.
You do an ebay international search— you can find Windows 10 Pro keys for 4-5 dollars from UK sellers. Download Win 10 at the Microsoft Win 10 site. You download it into a bootable 8 or 16gb flash drive. Microsoft creates this for you. Use this flash drive to install Windows 10.
Also just find ebay for UK and do your search there for “windows 10 key”
Obviously one should not pay the hostile anti white entities Hollywood or Silicon Valley any money. However, I don’t think Hollywood really cares that much about making money, all their recent big movie ventures (such as Star Wars, the Marvel universe, remaking old movies with non white actors) show that they care more about being the SJW propaganda department for the USA. Even if Hollywood went completely bankrupt, they would easily get a massive bailout from the deep state, as the deep state is fully aware of what the true role of the US mass entertainment complex is.
You might want to research what 1C and Buka are.
Hollywood doesn’t exist to make money by selling movies to consumers, it exists to sell the opportunity to put propaganda in movies to interest groups (though the US government would of course intervene if, say, Putin wanted to fund a Hollywood movie). Hollywood, Facebook, Google, these things will never go bankrupt because they don’t exist to make profits, to the contrary, they are loss making by design because having to compete with unprofitable industries makes it impossible for competitors to emerge.
The biggest propaganda coup of Americanism has been convincing so many people that the free market means that the output of giant corporations is driven by consumer demand. “Educated” Westerners have been conditioned to reject “conspiracy theories” like the idea that companies could be run by interest groups that are willing to take billions in losses to uphold a monopoly because they value power more than profits.
I like buying games from GOG and e-books from baen.com since they don’t have DRM.
But even if a game is on GOG, if it has SJW shit in it or a fuckton of DLCs or the price is too high, I will pirate it (as long as it’s even worth playing in the first place).
Sharing information is a holy right, like free speech. The copyright mafia will swing on the day of the rope.
It’s a pity that the pirate parties in Europe are now mostly infested with SJWism, like the wider FOSS community itself. Same with the green parties. I think it’s a conspiracy by the corporations, flood any movement created around a sane idea with insane leftists that will put people off.
As for the lost sales argument, here’s my personal anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
When I was a student I used to spend a significant amount of money every month on books, even though I was also pirating and reading online. Then, the local copyright mafia arranged the shutdown of an online Bulgarian library which had zero commercial activity (no ads or profit or anything), just a bunch of volunteers donating their time and money to make books available for the masses.
That day I swore I will never buy a book from a Bulgarian publisher again, to boycott all of them (as no publishing house distanced themselves from that “cybercrime operation”) – the library was back online 3 days later but I did keep my promise and I never bought another book from a Bulgarian book store again (used to buy on average 3 books per month before that).
It has been years since the last time I held an actual “physical” book in my hands. Everything you want to read, you can find it on the internet, usually for free. Come to think of it, why do we still have book stores? Why are the people willing to pay for books?
Quality hardbacks and/or antiquarian works.
My physical book collection reached its trough around the mid-2010s, but has grown since I came to Russia.
If I ever become sufficiently rich for it, I’ll start investing in antiquarian books. Not only is it near guaranteed to generate good returns, but it also looks great – and preserves culture.
I suspect people now mostly come for the adjoining coffeeshop.
After sitting in front of two screens all day long at work, it’s nice to come home and give up the glare and just open a book and read it (weekends too, especially reading by sunlight is great). Hardbound books provide photos too, that I think are greatly missing from e-books. If I’m not mistaken, I think that the original impetus towards electronic text is waning? Why are stubborn audiophiles willing to shell out much more money to purchase LP albums than CD’s? Is the listening quality really that much better? In fact, CD’s as a technology are already old school, yet there are plenty of music stores that still sell them.
Most bookstores that are left in the West are leftist hangouts or second hand stores.
There’s a bookstore across the street from my window and every title they have on display is some commie stuff (like a really nice looking hardcover binding of The Communist Manifesto that would look classy on a bookshelf if it didn’t have its name on it). Besides books they also sell the leftist magazines that used to be funded by the USSR and were once full of articles translated from Russian – now they’re russophobic and full of articles translated from English.
They seem to have no lack of costumers in my horrible Red neighborhood.
I don’t know a single “music store” that carries CDs. Pass a couple that sell vinyl records, though.
Target and WalMart carry an ever more limited selection of CDs, generally not at good prices compared to online.
Barnes & Noble (primarily a chain bookstore) still sell CD’s. ZIA records in Arizona has plenty of almost warehouse size stores where they primarily sells CD’s, but also provide some vinyl and even books. There are at least 4-5 such stores that I’m aware of. You must live somewhere in the sticks?…
Yup. The result is than almost no writers anywhere can make a living out of books. Sure, why should you care; people buy less books every year, publishing houses accept less and less new authors (because it’s too risky and too costly) and the rates for the authors are going down. Because of that, soon ONLY the propaganda will be sold, because it will be subsidized.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but here it’s very easy and not expensive at all to simply publish your own book, paying for the printing. You don’t have to be approved by a publishing house or anything.
I have a friend who is a poetess, she has a Facebook page where she publishes her poems, obviously for free. The page became popular, with over 100 000 likes, and she decided to publish a collection. She had to pay ~400 Euro for printing about 300 books, which she then sells over the internet.
Her day job is a teacher. If even a teacher in Bulgaria (i.e. someone poor in an already poor country) can self-publish, surely it isn’t very hard.
And while facebook is not a traditional piracy venue, it’s still somewhere on the net where her works were shared for free. And if it wasn’t for that, I don’t think she could have sold anything.
For classical music, CDs are still the standard option.
Unless you only pirate FLAC files from SoulSeek (or make your own FLAC files), how could people think CDs are out of date (for classical music)?
Even on SoulSeek, not all the FLAC files are very good, and a lot do not all download.
It’s also the number of hours of work to make FLACs. And it is much easier and less work to organize the music collection when you just have CDs.
So for people who listen to classical music – we’ll still be using CDs when we are old men.
The only problem with CDs.
Even Naim CD players are breaking after some years.
I wanted to have a “CD experience” on laptop. So to achieve this, wasted many hours to produce FLACs, then putting them through a Asus Xonar Essence STU.
But you still need a CD collection as the source to make FLAC files from, you have to waste hours to do this, and I think only a few thousand people in the world can waste as much time as this.
OT: Spent a week on various outdoor activities in the eastern Canadian wilderness, ending in a trip to Quebec.
There are elections in Quebec. These posters were all over the central part of the city:
https://i.imgur.com/Of2cLJX.jpg
The Russian takeover of the West proceeds…
Will be busy catching up on things and not posting much this week, triggered Russians like Felix in need of a safe space can rejoice.
Who repairs a CD player? I’ve had my current one for at least 5 years, and although its starting to show its mortality, I’m anticipating paying at least less than $100 (what I paid 5 years ago, $130 or so). As far as I know, CD players quality is all pretty much the same. It’s still the in the speakers that determines the greatest difference in listening quality.
What happens is publishing becomes more and more centralized.
So now a lot of books, whether you walk in a bookshop in Madrid, Moscow, London, Tel Aviv, Paris, Berlin – are the same books. It’s good business for translators
Centralization is happening more and more for English world authors though. So the intellectual fashions are coming more and more from an English world, and translated a year later into other languages.
Has advantages and disadvantage. Advantage that everyone is now can now be in the same debates. But disadvantages are too obvious to say.
“all the really cool kids in the West couldn’t care less for that”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=67p4QihDO9c
Glad to see you back. I think that you’ll find the last 10-15 entries of Karlin’s Romania trip interesting, regarding pre-Moldavian and Romanian lands that were nominally within the Galician-Volhynian princedom (interesting maps too)…I know that you also find old ‘Ruthenian’ history interesting too.
Same here, but the point is that this is the easiest part. The good book must be edited. Then, you have to sell it; which means access to bookstores, which do not want self-publishing books (too much risk). So you the only way is selling via internet – in Poland there are few sites accepting self-published books, but they have not that impressive visitors number. Selling it yourself, like your teacher did, is an option only if someone has incredible marketing skill, or if she/he has already huge fan base.
Another thing is that writing book takes time. Editing books takes time. I just don’t get how anyone can then think it’s ok to “pirate” the book, especially if it’s good. You are basically saying to author “f* you”. Will you friend be happy if someone would just took her book , scan it, create ebook and start to give it away for free?
Thanks for the heads up, will definitely read them.
Sadly, there is significant audio difference between CD players.
Simply explanation, because – even theoretically – what is required to convert CD data, correctly timed analogue signal in continuous time, is a nightmare.
CDs are perfect for storing data – it’s perfect for computer applications (where CD transport performs a simple function, and timing does not matter) . But for synchronously reading and converting them into analogue signal happening in the correct time, which is required for the stereo system, is much more difficult. End result of the challenges – nice sounding CD players are expensive.
When my CD player broke, I just bought a new one. Because I assume that even if they replace one component with a new one, then another of its many components will break later.
But maybe it was stupid, because I had a more better one, and replaced with a worse sounding one.
Just put FLAC files on a USB, that you plug into a DAC, which you connect to your amplifier. End result of the process will sound equivalent of using a really good CD player.
We’ll still always need our CD collection though.
It’s particularly funny how they figure if 1 million people watched their bullshit for free, that means 1 million people would have been willing to pay $15 for their bullshit, thus they were deprived of $15 million dollars due to piracy.
Try reading a big academic textbook online, making notes in the margins, flipping back and forth to find connected information, folding the corner of the page for quick reference etc. Is there a reader that does that? And what about big, complex, A3-size illustrations?
I find AbeBooks pretty good for such stuff, it’s IIRC a network that any second hand seller of books can join, bit like a book-only eBay. And you know by using it your cash is (mostly) going to a second hand book seller which is A Good Thing IMHO.
I find AbeBooks pretty good for such stuff
I get about a third of my books from them. Maybe another third as ebooks, the last third from a mixture of other specialty sites and actual second hand book shops. I’d be happy enough to get them all in ebook form but too few that I want are available. When someone says all the books they want are available for their Kindle I just assume they are just reading the latest crap the MSM are promoting.
Good point, I forgot Barnes and Noble. Overall, though, there aren’t many places to buy CDs compared to population.
We live in downtown LA, by the way, and for the massive population of this city, county, and area, there aren’t many “music stores” carrying CDs at all. As for Target, it seems to keep shrinking its CD selection.
How many music stores, or stores offering and selling any appreciable number of CDs, can there be, given the continuing collapse in CD sales?
https://www.stereophile.com/content/11-years-us-cd-sales
CD Album Sales in the USA
651 million in 2004
151 million in 2014
CD Album Sales (not sure if USA or world)
085 million in 2017: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-compact-discs-20180302-story.html
I think Best Buy stopped selling CDs, while Target is considering getting out or moving to a consignment model:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-compact-discs-20180302-story.html
I find AbeBooks pretty good for such stuff,
If you haven’t already, have a look at
http://www.addall.com/
which reports results from a multitude of used-book vendors, including AbeBooks.
They have Fry’s Electronics in LA, don’t they? They still carried CD’s the last time that I looked there.
Barnes and Noble fired all their full-time store employees a few months back. I assumed that meant that they were not long for this world.
People who buys CDs, are the sophisticated customers in any country. So therefore, they often order them online from their desk. (They don’t need to go to the shop and ask for help).
Also nowadays, people are usually buying boxes with larger numbers at the same time. For example, today around $230, on Amazon, for 50 Deutsche Grammophon CDs:
https://www.amazon.com/Deutsche-Grammophon-Originals-Legendary-Recordings/dp/B00LNRJMCQ/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF
With prices so low nowadays, it does not make sense, not to buy CDs. You could try to download these on SoulSeek, but you would be unlikely to find them all as FLAC files, and half of them wouldn’t download fully. You also with CDs receive everything in good organization, labelled and with packaging.
The advantage of piracy, is if you want to listen before you buy something – but even then it often results in less enjoyment.
What about Amoeba? I thought this is where all hipsters go to buy second-hand John Coltrane -although I remember it was kind of empty.
I agree you want any textbook, it’s nicer with a paper version
And personally, for any other book, I think it’s nicer with a paper version.
It’s an area where governments think schools changing to electronic textbooks will somehow “modernize” education.
I was reading in the newspaper an article about parents in a city, who are complaining now because the schools in their city are required to change to electronic textbooks, but many parents of the children don’t even have required computers in their home (kind of amazing families which still don’t have computers now).
Never heard of Amoeba?…ZIA is where all of the modern day hipsters in AZ congregate, yester years orange, purple and green haired weirdos that have apparently spawned the current crop of tattooed wonders. Ya think that Thorffinnsson sports any tattoos? I hope he’s doing better after his recent accident?…
Kids still exist, despite the efforts of the ZOG.
“It has been years since the last time I held an actual “physical” book in my hands. Everything you want to read, you can find it on the internet, usually for free. Come to think of it, why do we still have book stores? Why are the people willing to pay for books?”
One might buy cheap clothes online instead of going to shops, or order food delivered to one’s home instead of venturing beyond one’s house or apartment. One could also consume soylent instead of “real” food.
It might be expedient at times to take the “easier option”, when one finds oneself short of time or money or other means, but ultimately these things are merely substitutes for the genuine thing.
You know much more about this than I do. Does burning a CD result in quality comparable to that of the original CD? Are FLAC files so hard to find?
Yes it should be a good copy.
If you are connected to internet, software (like http://www.exactaudiocopy.de) which includes AccurateRip plugin automatically compare to a database (and takes checksum from your copy) across different peoples’ extractions of the same CDs.
You could also use CUETools to check your extraction to same database.
General finding from the database checks, was that differences between different copies on the database are statistically very low (i.e. great majority of extractions from CDs are good).
People are sharing their FLAC files on e.g. Soulseek. But really it’s a few thousand people (maybe optimistically a few tens of thousands), and not all have the application open or are online – so often you can end up downloading only half an album.
You can just the buy CDs and make your own FLACs. This is what I think is the normal way. The only thing – it uses about 10 minutes for each CD.
–
What is your aim? If you are live abroad, and want to listen on laptop? Or you want to play files on your hi-fi?
If both, I recommend a lot “Asus Xonar Essence STU” as good value. Because it includes a headphone amplifier (if you are travelling). But it also has RCA output to connect to your amplifier, so you can use it as DAC if you want to play FLAC files from your laptop onto your hi-fi system.
Thanks! What’s a good program with which to make FLAC files out of CDs (I, too, always buy physical CDs in addition to downloading)?
I listen while driving and am contemplating getting a car with a very good audio system such as Bowers & Wilkins, and wanting to take full advantage without going back to CDs which are cumbersome for that purpose.
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/download/
When it’s installed. On the EAC menu (top left), it just has to be “compression options” and “use file extension option” is “.flac”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58RmQsGGbeQ
Much appreciated!
You’re obviously at least one pay grade higher on the ‘audiophile’ latter then I, however, I seem to get pretty good results just popping in a blank CD into my laptop and ‘burning’ a purchased or borrowed commercial CD. The sound quality is almost as good as the original, perhaps just slightly muted down. Am I missing something here with the FLAC files technolgy that you’re talking about? Instead of a ’10 minute compression’ it takes me about 2 minutes to burn a CD?….
When you copy a CD to another CD, it should be fine (it should be no loss of quality at all, if you are not mismanaging the process in some way).
Then if you play the (copied) CD on your CD player of your hi-fi – that is the same as playing the original CD.
FLAC file is if you want to play music on your computer, or if you want to play music on a separate DAC connected to your hi-fi system.
FLAC is cool because it allows you to make a lossless extraction and compression of the music, so the quality is the same as on the original (uncompressed) CD.
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What is your purpose?
If you want to listen on your laptop, it’s best to make an extraction and FLAC files version of your CDs. And then play the FLAC files (instead of the CDs) on your laptop.
If you use software like Foobar2000, with wasapi plugin configured. You can get a perfect output to a DAC.
I just listen now on headphones, on an external headphone amplifier/DAC (Xonar Essence).
–
Maybe you want to avoid CD players (because they break too much, or are expensive)?
You could play FLAC files from your laptop, through (foobar with wasapi plugin), to external DAC, connected to your amplifier and speakers – this way you can get a really good quality process (it shouldn’t be worse than a good CD player, as long as DAC is equivalent quality to the DAC inside your CD player).
Alternatively, you could put FLAC files on a USB and plug it into a DAC. (I haven’t tried this myself).